3 ms·
What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?
by sunkenvicar 7y ago
What are the severe environmental impacts of hydro?
- prolepunk 7y agoFlooding, especially when building hydro in flat areas. Earthquakes -- there is some causality Destruction of fish habitat -- salmon in Columbia river In general, making water go slow when it used to go fast has a lot more negative consequence for the environment than one might expect. I find this episode of 99 percent invisible to be really informative -- https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fish-cannon/
- eppp 7y agoDams also result in large methane releases. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/hundreds-new-dams-could-mean-trouble-our-climate https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/09/hundreds-new-dams-co...
- jandrese 7y agoI didn't say severe, but there are environmental impacts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reservoirs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reserv... The biggest is the destruction of migrating fish habitat, sometimes reversible with specialized structures (salmon ladders), sometimes not. There is also some evidence for increased CO2 emissions from artificial reservoirs.
- sunkenvicar 7y agoHydro is clean and cheap baseload power. Better than nuclear. The impact of creating water reservoirs must be immense. Because we are dreaming about replacing hydro with vastly inferior power sources.